Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

colinneagle writes "Verizon's 2013 Data Breach Investigation Report is out and includes data gathered by its own forensics team and data breach info from 19 partner organizations worldwide. China was involved in 96% of all espionage data-breach incidents, most often targeting manufacturing, professional and transportation industries, the report claims. The assets China targeted within those industries included laptop/desktop, file server, mail server and directory server, in order to steal credentials, internal organization data, trade secrets and system info. A whopping 95% of the attacks started with phishing to get a toehold into their victim's systems. The report states, 'Phishing techniques have become much more sophisticated, often targeting specific individuals (spear phishing) and using tactics that are harder for IT to control. For example, now that people are suspicious of email, phishers are using phone calls and social networking.' It is unknown who the nation-state actors were in the other 4% of breaches, which the report says 'may mean that other threat groups perform their activities with greater stealth and subterfuge. But it could also mean that China is, in fact, the most active source of national and industrial espionage in the world today.'"
The report also notes that financially-motivated incidents primarily came from the U.S. and various Eastern European countries.

At some point, you realize that the only time you ever communicate with that part of the Net, is when you're receiving an attack of some sort. Before long, "The Great Firewall of China" isn't going to be something installed by the Chinese government; it's something the rest of us will have done.

Hmm... maybe that was the government's devious plan to combat internal dissent and external influences, all along!

The difference is that from what I've seen of Asian corporate culture (I worked there for a couple years), it is not taboo to steal IP from competitors. In fact it's more or less considered normal albeit unspoken. It's not unusual for an employee who refuses to do it to be let go for other unspecified reasons.

You've seen the stories over and over. Like how the Chinese government required Siemens to contract with Chinese companies to manufacture high speed trains, then once the companies had "acquired" enough technical knowledge to do it themselves they dumped Siemens. It makes me facepalm every time I read about some naive Western tech company eager to do business in China bending over backwards to please the Chinese government, like lambs to the slaughter, thinking that a few pieces of paper promising their IP is safe will protect them.

In the late 20th century, this behavior was pretty much localized to the region. But now with the Internet, the behavior can reach around the globe. Those of you who think Western companies are the epitome of evil are in for a rude shock, once you see the no-holds-barred style of capitalism practiced in the East.